0:00:05 Advocacy; did not start out to be an activist, but an anthropologist; part of thesis on political organization of the Kayapo; started by taking the position of the Kayapo against the Indian Service; exploitation of Kayapo; corruption; back from first fieldwork 1964 but during thesis writing had little time to get involved; first job; taught Marxist theory classes at Cornell in the context of activism; didn’t match up with the Brazilian Indian cases except theories on production; found interpretation of Kayapo moving to social production; commitment to activism involved class struggle, but Kayapo had no classes; exploitation more relevant; 1968 scandals over “genocide” of Amazonian Indians; Brazilian Government guilty of malign neglect rather than genocide
0:11:04 Became involved in organizing political projects working with Brazilian N.G.O.’s trying to articulate Kayapo activities; also tried to address questions of “rights” within the A.A.A.; involved in efforts to establish Committee of Human Rights; a lot of opposition to value-laden research and fear that governments would refuse to let anthropologists work in areas where they had adopted the indigenous peoples’ position; involved in formulating anthropological position on human rights; applied anthropology and activism
0:17:52 Tensions with both the Brazilian authorities and the Kayapo; good and bad in both groups; have recently worked with Brazilian Indian Service, now FUNAI, investigating an un-demarcated Kayapo area; have to keep an open mind and make contributions where you can;
0:24:08 Anthropologists’ interpretations which may be at odds with that of the people they study; Kayapo not yet concerned; have started to have democratic associations to please N.G.O.s; ideas on who should vote; alien game; bilingual education project where insisted girls came as well as boys; training for Kayapo teachers, both male and female; ideas of equality absurd in Kayapo philosophy
0:33:18 Did not enjoy initial spell at Ithaca; divorced; dull, provincial place; 1968 invited by Chicago; lively department and city; stayed there for thirty years, finally left in 1999; married Jane Fajans (now Associate Professor at Cornell) who was also then an Associate Professor at Chicago; from Fall 1989 she was teaching at Cornell; had two young daughters so agreed to settle in Ithaca and I would commute to Chicago, coming back every other weekend; strain; had lived in a collective house in Chicago, set up in 1968; had been the home of George Shultz, then became known as the Red Cats Collective; continued to live there when Jane came to Ithaca
0:43:15 Cornell is now much more like the Chicago department as it was; in Chicago now almost all the people who were committed to that kind of social theory have left (Radcliffe-Brown taught there) – Fred Eggan, Tom Fallers, Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, Nur Yalman, Stanley Tambiah, Raymond Smith, have all gone; continuity now represented through the Comaroffs; Cornell had been area based with no common body of anthropological theory; now changed and department has a common core of course work
0:49:49 Kayapo video project started in 1990; had previously done ‘Face Values’ with BBC in 1980’s, then two films with Granada in 1987 and 1989; in all cases came to Kayapo with British film crews; before I went to the Kayapo [to film], three Brazilians had done some filming with them and had taught the Kayapo to use a video camera; had also taken two persons to Rio for further training in video and film techniques; video camera left with Kayapo but no longer worked; however understood the role of video and photography in the national culture; found it an exciting idea; presents as reciprocity included video cameras; questions about what and how they should shoot; they most wanted to film ceremonies, not everyday life; realized that Brazilians controlled the technology of representation so pointedly filmed the Brazilians and other film-makers; went to film the debate on Brazilian Constitution on indigenous rights
0:57:51 I was involved in some but not all; they would produce continuous shoots, view it in villages, but that was all; needed to have an archive where film could be edited; the video project aimed at teaching Kayapo to edit and produce films; Centre for Indigenous Work in San Paulo made available its editing studio within an umbrella project on video in villages; I assumed role of assistant editor and kept shot records; realized it was a way of studying process of formation of representations; profoundly interesting; made many films of themselves, also interacting with Brazilians; still filming; films have never been shown on Brazilian TV but at many film festivals throughout the world; films produced by Kayapo for Kayapo and in Kayapo; have made translations of three films, will do more
1:04:30 Chagnon affair; misrepresentation by press; was private communication to heads of A.A.A. committees warning of problems associated with book ‘Darkness in El Dorado’; this private communication was leaked; issues around what Patrick Tierney said on the conduct of 1968 expedition on the Orinoco where they became involved in an epidemic of measles; at same time interested in drawing blood samples and also had a vaccine they were using to vaccinate to Yanomami; maintained this was purely humanitarian but others, including Tierney, suggested it was used to test a virgin population with a highly reactive vaccine; many Yanomami died of measles and Tierney suggested these deaths may have been caused by vaccine; others have said this not possible, but vaccines can cause bad reactions; James Neel interested in degree to which Yanomami could resist this vaccine through their genetic makeup; Chagnon’s representations of the Yanomami; socio-biological ideas that Yanomami at an earlier stage of evolution, between apes and humans; eugenic argument; Wilson defended Neel and Chagnon; Neel worked on Kayapo genealogies which I supplied; Barbara Johnston’s work on Neel pointed to his challenging immune systems in previous projects; big controversy, much of it unethical; A.A.A. constituted a committee which deflected and covered up the material rather than investigating; their preliminary report caused a storm of protest; final report makes several important points; Tierney’s main charges have not been refuted; Chagnon denounced for breach of professional ethics; association forced A.A.A. to investigate and finding critical fault with individual anthropologists; code of ethics applied